


Deceptively Complex, Something to Fight For & I Will Tell You Something (I've Never Told Anyone Else)

by vaguely_concerned



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 15:28:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three freest-of-freeforms Arthur/Eames poems of differing lengths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deceptively Complex, Something to Fight For & I Will Tell You Something (I've Never Told Anyone Else)

_**DECEPTIVELY COMPLEX** _

 

Sometimes I think

(fear)

that you are writing things

in your curly hand

with invisible ink on the inside of my wrist

and that I am meant to read it

that somewhere in there behind your eyes you are watching me while you scatter

featherlight butterfly-meanings over thin skin, leaving them

between the blue of the veins and the stretch of sinew

(I have seen that you like the strength in my fingers

the way they move and curl and still

even if I wouldn’t admit to myself

that I knew)

Sometimes I think

(hope)

that my too-blunt silences and broken bones

are part of why you like me. I think

(think think hope) that some of the time you see that I try

(I do I try so hard I’ve always tried)

and that, just, perhaps

I am not a sharp and cutting piece of monochrome

two-dimensional and colourless

despite the inherent (apparent) simplicity

in the stark lines

of my blueprints.

(that perhaps you know about paradoxes

and the mazes to be found

in plain sight)    

I think

(see)

that we should never work out.

I don’t have your words and I can’t say it pretty but this, at least, should be clear.

We should grate on each other, shred each other to

fine white sand

on the edges that are so clearly gnashing. 

In evidence:

                     I need the world around me

         under control.

                    You need the world inside you

 

Furthermore:

When I feel unsafe I turn myself into

no one

When you feel unsafe you turn yourself into

everyone else

(secretly you’re so sharp you often cut yourself

and sometimes what you get cut on

is me)

And also:

1.    Only a blink-of-the-eye’s worth of corpus callosum is keeping us from open cerebral warfare 

2.    I don’t trust words and you live by twisting them

3.    I won’t be able to help wanting specificity where you want open spaces and

4.    You will look for things in me that I simply don’t know how to offer.   

Sometimes I think

that you leave trails of the messages you wrote in the sand

just so I can know that

the waves washed them away

(because you don’t always trust me to read them when

they’re fresh and clear and unbroken)

and more than once

I have caught myself

looking the other way to avoid

seeing myself mirrored back

in your eyes

(because I know how you are

about eyes and fractured mirrors)

I know that we should never work out

and yet

instinctively

thoughtlessly

surely

I will fire the first bullet knowing that

you have my back

and I’m not sure

it’s really about it

_working_

at all.

 

Sometimes I think

the simplest things

come in disguise as the

deceptively complex

 

 

 

**_SOMETHING TO FIGHT FOR_ **

 

I think that somewhere along the way I stopped dealing cards from the bottom of the deck and started sticking them up your sleeve; raised the stakes without letting you know

broke my lips on the words I couldn’t speak.

And I know you deal in probabilities and numbered lists, that you never put more in the pot than what’s sensible and that you run risk assessments over your nerve endings for every breath

just to be certain, just to be sure

and I am forever in awe of the way you make numbers into a lifeline and the lifeline into a wire and the wire into a weapon, of your ability to find foothold in imbalance and security in being under attack

reality through dreams

while I tell truths merely through omission of lies and find my prisons and my sacred grounds in and under open skies

dream reality into the shapes I need, my face into something easily removed and I can be anyone except for the man who doesn’t need to be anyone else.

 

———

 

I have been alone for so long that I no longer find consolation in being my own imaginary friends.

 

———

(You put your fingers to the pulse of everything that’s wrong with me every time your face unfolds into a smile and your hands stumble, showing me that weakness, showing me that you don’t always know what to do with them, every time you leave acceptance like a tantalizing lit fuse for me to find and a kiss like it’s a simple solid thing in a world of clouds of smoke.)

———

 

I am

by inclination and nature

a cheat and a coward, a figure in the distance and a moth to the light

and I’ve long since found that this is the way I can survive; a breath away from life and at a bright smile’s distance

playing with loaded dice and being prepared to lose fabricated poker chips.

You are

above all

unapologetic about being alive

breathing with that fierce triumph that you are here to fight for the next breath and the next

and sometimes I watch you and wonder what would happen if you had no external enemy and what would happen to the wreckage    

and then I edge my gaze away to find patterns in clouds

that tell all the things I don’t want said in plain words

 

———

(it’s easier with ‘I love you’ than ‘I want to see you more often’ and it’s better with ‘I need you’ than ‘I trust you’ and it’s always safer with ‘I am never changing’ than ‘I think that I want to be honest’)

———

 

I am ever aware of your exacting standards and where I must be found lacking

and ever afraid of the way you don’t seem to mind. This very concept – that there are times where I am sufficient without careful moderation and where I don’t need to adapt to be acceptable – is one I have never considered before

 but then you _are_ really bad at lying

so I figure I should be able to tell.  

 

———

(it’s easier to be willing to die for someone than it is to live alongside them and it’s easier to run than it is to welcome pain and it’s easier to not see than knowing that you can get scared too)

———

 

 I love the way the two of us fit into each other in the spaces between paradoxes and the way we are a fight that is not a fight

anymore

and somewhere along the way I must have told you more than I had imagined and started daring to breathe while you opened up uncovered places for me to see

and maybe

just maybe

being brave comes with having something to fight for       

 

 

 

**_I WILL TELL YOU SOMETHING (I'VE NEVER TOLD ANYONE ELSE)_ **

 

 

One day - when we are

mid-step, caught ungrounded between

harsh revealing dream and yielding

kind reality

in the light of the dusk and the dawn rising

in twin reflection on your face –

I will tell you

something

I’ve never told anyone else.

———

 

(There is blood on my hands, but

      you don’t seem to mind

       the prints they leave

          on your skin.)

 

———

 

You leave your thoughts all over the place, unlabelled, cut short, unexplained,

Confident that you do not care whether they are found.

Sometimes, when I wake up to find yet another jumble of words never said discarded on the nightstand,

I wonder how you can speak so much

And yet say so little,

and how you think I can’t hear the words you do not say, how you are scared,

still,

that I will not find them in the

whorls of your fingertips

the

edge of your glance

the

softening of your mouth and the crease around your eye

the

quiet honesty you haven’t betrayed to yourself.

You can keep not caring if they’re found

And I can keep finding them

calmly puzzling them into a bigger picture

I have already seen.

———

 (I have been imagining

                                  monsters in hall light

           in the snow on a porch singing crisply

of autumn

in the flickering heart of a fire

                                                                                                                        

 just so I didn’t

  have to       

find them tucked between

    the sheets

all honey-drenched in sunlight

or

glinting in the edge of a mirror.)

———

 

I am not sure, now, what it was I used to dream about, back when dreams tumbled over my synapses of their own accord, before they were aided by the precision of a needle and the patchwork of other people’s imagery between my tasteful monochromes and grasping tentative motives.

I know I did dream, vaguely - dreams about homework, or sex, or people I knew, perhaps this overwhelming sense of impatience, of being in potentia, unmolded, dissatisfied with my own imprecision and the things I was sensing out of the corner of my eyes.

I remember the grey fog of “Just wait till you go to college!” and thinking, during my first kiss and graduation and at parties:

 

“Is that all?”

 

My last natural dream, though, I do remember that one. I suspect everyone in the trade does, if they don’t take measures to forget it.

In the dream I was standing in my mom’s living room, barefoot, the only light a sliver of yellow from a open crack in the door to the hall.

On the floor – shining clean, of course, it was my mom’s living room floor – was her China vase, the only thing she’d got from her mother when she died. I think it was the nicest thing she owned.

It was in shards, strewn like seashells over the carpet.

The first time I came home really drunk, I knocked it down from the cupboard, and it shattered, that delicate porcelain cracking open. I felt sick about it, tried piecing it together, smuggled glue into my room where I’d hidden the pieces in my closet, failed miserably in fixing it.

I think that was the first time I realized I was better at taking things to pieces than I was at putting them together. I never told my mom before I left for the military.

In my dream I looked at the broken vase and, suddenly, in the ways of dream logic, knew exactly how to fix it, just to find that I no longer cared enough to do it.

I stood, dull-eyed, in my mother’s living room, studying each stitch in the embroidery with some vaguely Christian slogan she had on the wall, unable to tell whether I was still breathing.

When I woke I knew that would be the last natural dream I’d have, after weeks of dreaming of only gunshots and muddy trails and blood, and all I could think was

 

“…Is that all?”

-

I’ll never ask what your last dream was, but I took a wrong turn on a job once and got a glimpse of a vast ballroom with a chequered floor, with no ceiling, not even a sky, the dancers blurs of colour and people with eyes like sharks behind their masks, scattered fractured mirrors sending them into infinity, and a tune that is either a heartbeat or a hunting call.

 

———

( I promise I will see you

                          No matter whose face you are wearing.)

———

 

You seem to think that your heart is like a bruise in your chest, that it’s a sore spot, a liability, a place where the shifts in your blood leave tender damaged tissue on the inside of your ribs with each tide.

Some of your charm lies in how you secretly think that’s why you turned out as you did, with the masks and the ruthlessness and the honesty disguised in clever lies, that you used them to fill a place that would otherwise have stood empty.

What use would it be to set up all that protection for an empty chest?   

 

——-

(You said, tilting my face up to meet the

     sweet tang of surrender in your eyes:

                                         “I have spent my life dodging bullets

                                              but no one takes aim quite

                                                               like you”)

 

———

 

Let me tell you

something

I’ve never told anyone else.

 

I have found that the most vital things in life are all breakable. Minds, hopes, spines, faiths, hearts, dreams. There are few things more disheartening than a leaking mind, a fractured hope, a mangled broken dream. You see a faith hacking breaths out through a punctured lung, and you think that no amount of tape or glue, no metal rings or puppet strings, no bandages or well-framed stings

can put it all together

whole and unmarred

as it was.

If you were to take one thing away from me

I wish that it was this:

The heart is not a China vase and it is not broken by a young man stumbling in and knocking it down, but by the silence afterwards and the empty place, by the lingering smell of super glue and muffled swearwords from your son’s room.  And even then the memory of your mother need not be touched, not harmed, not in shards. It is never that simple. 

The heart is not a fixed thing, nor is it fragile or stupid or incapable of change.  

Your heart is a thing that can kiss each scar on my chest and mean it, that can scramble to its feet again and again to walk towards the dawn in the horizon, that can carry all its imperfections and weird places and ugliness with a different kind of beauty.

 

Things like that

weren’t made to be fixed.

They heal.


End file.
